BARAKA BASHMENT

Part 1.
When attempting to understand any statement, a person is required to be familiar with the basic assumed meanings of each word contained in the sentence provided. A simple sentence reading, “I went to the store” necessitates an understanding of at least A.) who “I” is; B.) what “went” means; and C.) the meaning of the word “store” (“to” and “the” are not necessary for a basic understanding, as any traveler in a foreign country can attest). Based on this quickly assessed information, the statement maker and receiver have completed, with relative success, a conversation.

In many cases, a statement’s meaning is harder to come by, and in order for relative comprehension to take place a person may require an explanation of a sentence. “What do you mean ‘it just sort of happened’?” is one example. Here, the provided reasoning “it just sort of happened” is not sufficient for the receiver, and further explanation is required where the basis of understanding will no doubt rely on the meanings of “it,” “sort of,” and what it is that “happened.” Though, I fear any explanation in this matter would not suffice.

In most cases, conversational language is used as a means to point to something “outside” of the sentence. This is often understood to be a specific meaning or direction. “ I feel sick today” or “Make a left at the giant chicken.” In these instances, language is assumed to be transparent, apolitical, and unbiased. Here, the use of language is almost unperceivable.

By the late 1960s, however, language’s neutrality was severely attacked by the academia and working-class alike (though this commonality of critique has yet to bridge these two classes in any impressive fashion). Psychoanalysts, as well as many writers and artists began to investigate language’s concrete and politically saturated characteristics, which often seemed to relate more to its essence rather than a specific trait. Are we using language, or is language using us? Are we born into a language that defines our being? The movement dealing most intimately with these questions was dubbed (at the protest of its own ‘participants’) language-writing.

As a result of this complex movement/turn in poetics, the material quality of text became foregrounded. Concrete poetry was causing ripples in a previously book-bound poetry scene, and innumerable experiments based on “text as textile” are to this day still visible and intriguing.

If within the poetry world previous to language-writing there was a call for a common-speak in order to unite the masses under the poetic acrobatics of a few male poet-seers, than language-writing was a call for the recognition that common-speak was a commodity through which the oppressor attempted to put the masses to sleep. Essentially, not unlike I-speak of the Rastafarians, language-writers showed that to use the language of those in power in order to subvert that power, was a losing battle, since imbedded in the language of power was an oppressive syntax. In order to counter this complicity in art, language itself became the subject of language-writing.

While the language movement presented possibilities in the construction of syntax, critics continued to show how this attempt at reader-co-creative writing remained a largely academic affair, the theories of which having little or no noticeable integration into the greater populous. To this day, language-writing’s earliest and most fantastic poetries remain largely for the musings of the higher educated—this in contrast to what seemed to be the impulse for the loosely collected language-project.

Despite the seemingly infinite approaches to reading and writing the language-writers proposed, still today the larger grade school population is without knowledge of its existence and benefit. Many essays have been written on why language-writing itself has yet to effect most school systems, and I am certain it has more to do with administration politics than the supposed inaccessibility of language-writing itself. Since these experiments have yet to be truly tested in a grade school setting across economic borders, it is impossible to state for certain that language-writing itself is to blame. However, one may make the claim that language-writing’s overt concern with whether or not a particular work fits the post-modern agenda has contributed to its occlusion from the mainstream educational system.

Although language-writing provided a qualitatively vast array of examples of decentered and syntactically challenged texts, the movement itself provided very little information regarding the reading of texts with more conventional qualities. With the exception of Bruce Andrews’ call for “wild reading,” very little is presented in the way of novel reading techniques where a student-reader may approach even the most conventional texts from radii hitherto unexplored.

Not until Julian Spahr’s well circulated book Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity was released was a focused attention paid to the reading of the world and its texts. This book takes its cues from the language-writing project and (in a way) introduces the evolving art-politic of the next generation of reader-writers. (With all due respect to the predecessors of this “next-wave,” who are still very active writers and theorists, and have in no way fallen off the poetic radar, but are in many ways more prominent now than they ever were). It is in this book that the reading of writing is finally foregrounded. If nothing else, it is this shift in focus from writer to reader-writer that demarcates the difference between these two generations. And it is from here that we may reassess our initial statements.

Since the most recent attention paid to hermeneutics, we can no longer say safely that a sentence simply is what it claims to be. To look again and more closely at and around the statement “I feel sick today” is to see a very partisan and political world. Is the statement referring to calling out sick from a job a person dislikes? Is it referring to the effects of a party attended the night before? Maybe, it is referring to the results of a presidential election. If this is the case, the idea of being sick takes on an entirely different connotation than if the person was merely allergic to hazelnuts. In any event, the statement “I feel sick today” is never entirely whole, complete, and isolated from its environment. In fact, one could say that the statement “I feel sick today” is an impossibility in its supposed autonomy.

Part 1. Brief history of words in poetics
Part 2: No sound stands alone: Negative Depth Experience
Part 3. The Severed Hand
Part 4. Unpacking the spiritual text

There is not a sound voiced or yet to be that does not carry with it the air of its pre-, post-, and future existence.

With this in mind, the sound /a/ contains at least: first, pre-, question, always, already, answer, pointer, B, C, open, mouth, open mouth, sexual innuendo, tongue, tongue depressor, throat, dentist, doctor, heart, and ascot and octopus alike. With this in mind a statement such as “A little to the left” may read or be experienced as: A first pre-question where always already answers may point to B and C open mouths not unlike sexual innuendos tongue tongue depressors allow the throats of dentists and doctors who wear ascots and eat octopus at trendy Japanese fusion restaurants still have a heart when humming /ah/ little to the left.

Based on the Negative Depth Experience (NDE) model, this level of interprexperience is a modest -1 where the experience of an invested -11 borders on (an at times desired) nauseous oblivion. To gain from the use of the NDE model one need only to first appreciate the blurry edges of the word. However, to start simply I will say that the NDE is considered a tool/practice for unpacking language.

As stated earlier, language carries with it the air of its pre-, post-, and future existence. This practice is a celebration of this existence and sees communication itself, in our limited perception of its entirety, as a proto-nirvanic linguistics. Meaning: utterance, sonic or other, and the immersion in utterance is an extra-ordinary endeavor. In terms of Zen, read extra-ordinary as ordinary.

Using Carlos Castaneda’s distinction between “ordinary’ and “non-ordinary” reality, the NDE attempts to re-introduce a finer line separating the two, so that our perceivable world-reality is once again a lush anarchic-possible world-reality as opposed to what often manifests as a prejudice frozen-identity constrained world-reality. Here, “frozen-identity” refers to the “I am this and not that” syndrome.

To state once again, NDE is a tool/practice. It is by no means meant to be an error-less dogma or manifesto for the liberation of the human being. I feel it is potent, though subject to the same limitations of scope most project-agendas seem to be subject to. I do feel, however, that NDE is a practice that can help people re-access an ability to handle deviation and true difference/multiplicity within language and possibly the world—if we accept as at least partially true the pun on word and world.